this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2026
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Shortening computer scientists to just scientists feels... Wrong
Why?
Probably because a good chunk of "computer scientists" are actually engineers. I say this as a computer scientist in the engineering college of my school
Most computer scientists have very limited expertise, none of which concerns human society. We might as well survey plumbers for their opinions.
Fun fact: did you know that the average CS major scores worse on reading and writing than a business major?
Imagine that level of cognitive decrepitude.
Who hurt you lmao
In all seriousness, there should be a control for liberal arts education. Computer Science is a specialized and rigorous field. If it's taught as the sole subject of a person's education, of course they are going to miss a lot compared to a degree in the arts. Meanwhile, as a computer science student at a liberal arts college, I'd wager I can communicate just fine.
Further, this chart feels disingenuous here due to your use of it to seemingly attempt justifying a cause-effect relationship where only correlation exists. Of course Computer Science students perform poorly in reading and writing compared to Philosophy and English majors. People who like reading and writing gravitate towards those majors, so they naturally will have a higher population of good communicators. The real issue is the failure of primary education in its attempt to train the general populace to read and write with any reasonable level of proficiency.
Also, since when are reading and writing the test of a person's cognitive function? Some of the most genuinely intelligent people I know couldn't write a good analytical essay if their life depended on it. Everyone has different strengths; for Computer Scientists, those just happen to be mathematics and deterministic logic instead of interpersonal communication. I don't get where the hate is coming from.
P.S. I'd read the study but the image is too low-res to make out the URL
The same could be said of sociologists and plumbers. Sociologists know about people and society, plumbers know about plumbing, and computer scientists know about computers.
With a topic of computers and society, like this one, they each have insight on the situation. I would hope getting them in a room together would lead to solutions less harmful than what's been proposed thus far.
What about cognitive understanding because those are very specific fields that logically wouldn't be the strong focal points for cs professionals compared to the other professionals in the chats?.
Do you read what you write?
as opposed to noncognitive understanding? Wtf are you talking about?
Do you have a source for
Do I have a source for the fact that computer scientists have no specialized training on topics outside of computer science? (In addition to being apparently illiterate on average, which is what their performance on the GRE implies.)
Fascinating question. Have an upvote.